Kunena Review

review date: Q2 2011

Kunena overview
The Kunena forum is a Joomla CMS plugin, and therefore is not a standalone application. There are several benefits to this in many circumstances; the drawback of course is that you will need the CMS installed first. Kunena is now the preferred option instead of Fireboard, the older plugin forum that provided the starting point for Kunena (see further down the page). It is very easily managed, and suitable for new forum admins.

Kunena forum website

Installation
Installing this free software is quick, easy and straightforward as it simply plugs into the Joomla CMS. That has one of the best extension systems around, so this procedure is normally quick and painless.

It is a capable forum and because it can only exist as part of Joomla, it can take advantage of the huge benefits of this arrangement. Those include sophisticated templates and high-level SEO.

Kunena integrates fully with Joomla. There is no need to set up any SQL parameters on install, because it is a seamless integration and therefore no database configs are necessary - all CMS plugins use the core database transparently.

CMS version issues
The forum can be installed in the J1.5 or 1.6 series. We installed and used it in J1.6 with no problem. However, at the date of the review, the J1.6 series is not fully supported by either plugins or templates and this will have a knock-on effect for the forum. For example the sh404plugin cannot be used at this time.


Documentation
Support is better all round for Kunena compared to the previous Fireboard version. The online docs are contained in a Mediawiki instance and work well. It would not be true to say that all possible issues are covered, but coverage is in general good.


Templates
Being part of Joomla, Kunena has access to what is probably the best templating system around. The default template will be immediately recognisable to anyone who used Fireboard. It takes some of its CSS from the main site template though, which results in slight differences in the appearance of forums on sites with different main CMS templates.

In Joomla, you can have a different template for every page if you want. The entire page layout and appearance is therefore infinitely customisable - and much more easily than with any other forum solution.


Plugins
There are a growing number of plugins for this plugin component, though not anywhere near as many as for discrete forums of course. If you have complex tasks to do within the forum then Kunena may not be the best solution. On the other hand, this environment is easy to code for, so any enhancement is possible.

 
SEO
Kunena SEO is light years ahead of any other forum due to the Joomla integration.

Kunena SEO is better than even vBulletin with the vbSEO plugin installed. That's because the whole foundation is so much better in the first place. All standalone forums have terrible code from the SEO point of view, and vbSEO can't fix that. It fixes about 100 other issues but the source code is still sub-optimal. In contrast Joomla source code is potentially near-perfect (depending on the template of course), and when the Joomla 2.0 tableless version comes out it will be almost unbeatable. Maybe Plone or a special Radiant implementation will beat it but that's precisely two out of 3,000-odd CMS - and costs are in a different league for those two anyway.

URLs: As you may imagine, you can have a choice of SEF URL types. When sh404 becomes available for J1.6, anything will be possible here.

Metadata: not perfect as yet but as J1.6 improves, this will be fixed. For full metadata benefit you would have to fill the meta by hand on every page - but of course this is a universal problem with meta in any case. To get the ultimate benefit, you have to do each page manually. Here, we would at least do the main frontend pages, and the board main pages. The rest could perhaps wait. But at least unique meta is available if you want it, for every single page. In 2008 only vB could equal that, at some cost, though the situation is better now. It's still the case that this is an unusual facility even though it is a commercial necessity.


Problems
Reduced functionality compared with standalone forums.
Strangely, the forum has a display (reached by clicking the Users link at the foot) of all members, including their private details - this is a security and privacy breach that is hard to explain. It needs fixing ASAP.
This won't be the best solution if you have a very busy Joomla site, since an integrated forum puts a heavy load on the core app / server. If there are more than say 5k uniques per day on the forum, you might be better off thinking about alternatives. Moving to something like vBulletin would also give better functionality.

Good points
Easy management compared to most other forums.
Good SEO without plugins.
Ability to have whatever you want on the page wherever you want it, due to the CMS integration.
Fast and easy setup.


Security
It's a plugin, so this depends a lot on the parent application. Here, the parent app is robust so it scores well - assuming you patch the CMS immediately a new upgrade is issued of course.

You must subscribe to the security bulletins and patch it immediately every upgrade comes out. Any statement that Joomla is insecure or easily hacked applies only to unpatched installs. This is entirely down to the webmaster. Every complex site needs a webmaster, it's not like the old HTML web page system.

However, there may be a question mark over running an integrated forum in an attack-prone environment. If the forum is fully integrated with a CMS, then if it were to be compromised, the main application can also be vulnerable. The database, if common - as it will be - can then be suspect. A forum will always be more vulnerable than a website application such as a CMS, as the forum allows people to register and become members (and thus receive some site privileges); and it allows users to input code of various sorts onto a page. For optimum security in a difficult environment, discrete (separate) applications are best.


Admin
As regards usability and efficiency: the admin backend is fine. It does the job with a lot less fuss and bother than any other forum software we know of. It is tempting to think that the forum may be restricted or limited in some way, at first, because the admin is fairly simple; but this doesn't seem to be the case. You can do most things possible with other forums, as Joomla handles a large part of it - and a whole lot better, it has to be said, in some areas. With the new J1.6 version, the ACL transfers across to the forum so it is far superior to the old Fireboard version on Joomla 1.5 - but the ACL is not likely to be as good as that on vBulletin for example.

Setting up from scratch is now much easier than with Fireboard. In fact it may be easier than with most other forums.

There is only one item of weirdness we found: for some reason they have transposed the words 'category' and 'forum'. When you want to create a new forum for example, go to the section marked 'Categories' and mentally exchange it for 'forums' - as that's what it is. Wherever you see category, insert forum. 

If you are used to working with other forum software such as vBulletin, this will be confusing at first, as you will be looking everywhere for the individual forum management apparatus; but it's there, just misnamed as 'category' for some reason. In vB a category is a group of boards, just as the word's natural meaning implies - a group or sub-group. Here it's the smallest individual item. Easy to work with once you've figured this out - but a brain-scrambler until that point.


ACL
At last Joomla has ACL, and it works in the forum plugin of course. It looks as if all basic requirements are met, such as private boards, one person or group to have privileges as needed, and so on. You don't have the promotion system and usergroup fluidity that vBulletin has, but that is only to be expected.


The visitor experience
As good as any other forum; and probably better, in that a realistic selection of menus and other on-page assets like modules and so forth will be available due to the Joomla integration. This is an area where most forums fall down badly, but Kunena has a big advantage built-in.

Sure, SMF and phpBB can be extended if you know how, or can pay - but here it's only a click or two away.


Conclusion
A good simple forum solution if you run the Joomla CMS. In fact it's so good that it would even be worth entertaining the idea of installing a skeleton Joomla instance just to hold the Kunena forum - it's that good. Especially when you consider the benefits you'd get with Joomla.

The best route by a mile if you already have the CMS and don't mind a fully-integrated forum that uses your main site database and membership lists. This will work brilliantly up to maybe 10k visits per day or so - perhaps more, depending. In any case, with 20k visits per day you can easily afford load balancing - which might solve the problem.

For very busy sites, and also those with security issues, then this may not be the best solution. A busy forum puts a heavy load on a server, and integrating this into an already busy site may not be a great idea. Some sites will attract a lot of interest from attackers, and therefore it may be best if applications are totally discrete. A big forum needs more functionality than Kunena has, in any case.


Forum Application: Tech Spec
cost: free
type: Joomla CMS plugin
version reviewed: 1.6.3
zip installer size: 2.25MB
choice of templates: plentiful (though you may have to get into the CSS)
number of plugins (estimate): n/a
authors' site: www.kunena.org
example sites: start from the central site's forum members

FireBoard Review